Alas for the days when round us moved The chiefs and princes and friends we loved!'+
+Joyce's translation.
The Fate of the Children of Lir is the second of Erin's Three Sorrows of Story, and the third and greatest is the Fate of the Sons of Usnach, which has to do with a sloping rock on the north side of Fair Head, five miles from us. Here the three sons of Usnach landed when they returned from Alba to Erin with Deirdre--Deirdre, who was 'beautiful as Helen, and gifted like Cassandra with unavailing prophecy'; and by reason of her beauty many sorrows fell upon the Ultonians.
Naisi, son of Conor, king of Uladh, had fled with Deirdre, daughter of Phelim, the king's story-teller, to a sea-girt islet on Lough Etive, where they lived happily by the chase. Naisi's two brothers went with them, and thus the three sons of Usnach were all in Alba.
Then the story goes on to say that Fergus, one of Conor's nobles, goes to seek the exiles, and Naisi and Deirdre, while playing at the chess, hear from the shore 'the cry of a man of Erin.' It is against Deirdre's will that they finally leave Alba with Fergus, who says, "Birthright is first, for ill it goes with a man, although he be great and prosperous, if he does not see daily his native earth."
So they sailed away over the sea, and Deirdre sang this lay as the shores of Alba faded from her sight:--"My love to thee, O Land in the East, and 'tis ill for me to leave thee, for delightful are thy coves and havens, thy kind, soft, flowery fields, thy pleasant, green-sided hills; and little was our need of departing."
Then in her song she went over the glens of their lordship, naming them all, and calling to mind how here they hunted the stag, here they fished, here they slept, with the swaying fern for pillows, and here the cuckoo called to them. And "Never," she sang, "would I quit Alba were it not that Naisi sailed thence in his ship."
They landed first under Fair Head, and then later at Rathlin Island, where their fate met them at last, as Deirdre had prophesied. It is a sad story, and we can easily weep at the thrilling moment when, there being no man among the Ultonians to do the king's bidding, a Norse captive takes Naisi's magic sword and strikes off the heads of the three sons of Usnach with one swift blow, and Deirdre, falling prone upon the dead bodies, chants a lament; and when she has finished singing, she puts her pale cheek against Naisi's, and dies; and a great cairn is piled over them, and an inscription in Ogam set upon it.
We were full of legendary lore, these days, for we were fresh from a sight of Glen Ariff. Who that has ever chanced to be there in a pelting rain but will remember its innumerable little waterfalls, and the great falls of Ess-na-Crubh and Ess-na-Craoibhe? And who can ever forget the atmosphere of romance that broods over these Irish glens?
We have had many advantages here as elsewhere; for kind Dr. La Touche, Lady Killbally, and Mrs. Colquhoun follow us with letters, and wherever there is an unusual personage in a district we are commended to his or her care. Sometimes it is one of the 'grand quality,' and often it is an Ossianic sort of person like Shaun O'Grady, who lives in a little whitewashed cabin, and who has, like Mr. Yeats's Gleeman, 'the whole Middle Ages under his frieze coat.'
The longer and more intimately we know these peasants, the more we realise how much in imagination, or in the clouds, if you will, they live. The ragged man of leisure you meet on the road may be a philosopher, and is still more likely to be a poet; but unless you have something of each in yourself, you may mistake him for a mere beggar.